


Five Things That Never Happened To Ann Marlow

by Ankaret



Category: Marlow series - Forest
Genre: Gen, five things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-18
Updated: 2009-12-18
Packaged: 2017-10-04 13:24:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ankaret/pseuds/Ankaret
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five things that never happened to Ann Marlow.  (Well, okay, one of them very possibly did).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Things That Never Happened To Ann Marlow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Bookwormsarah](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bookwormsarah/gifts).



"There's a whacking great Rolls in the drive," said Lawrie excitedly, coming round the corner of the stables and encountering Rowan being exceptionally competent with some buckets. "A black one. How did it get there? Is it ours? What's going to happen to the minibus now? Because _I_ was thinking..." She stood on one leg and held on to the nearest corner of stable-wall for balance, and looked up at her sister under her fair lashes.

"When Nicola stands on one leg, I know she's going to say something unanswerable," said Rowan detachedly. "Whereas when _you_ stand on one leg, I know you're about to wedge your foot in the nearest bucket." She removed the bucket deftly from danger. "As for any unauthorised Rolls in the drive, my best guess is the County come to call. We're almost respectable these days, you know. Invited to parties, and all sorts."

"Oh," said Lawrie, visions of her own private excursion company dashed to the ground. "It isn't ours, then?"

"It most certainly isn't mine." Rowan frowned. "I don't suppose Ma... No, surely not."

"You mean there aren't any more tiaras left to sell?" said Lawrie intelligently. "Because if there was, I should have had a pony."

"You've got a pony. There he is in the loose-box, look. Four legs, one tail, all present and correct."

"Yes, but Ginty got Catkin _given_ to her..."

"Oh, Lawrie, not _now_," said Rowan firmly. Armed once again with buckets, she disappeared into the stables with an air of finality that even Lawrie didn't feel up to breaching.

Lawrie made her irked and disappointed way back across the cobbled stable-yard. On her way she fell in with Peter, who was running a finger round his collar under a newly-tied-looking tie and looking about as ruffled as Lawrie felt.

"Oh, lor," said Lawrie, reading the heraldry of the tie, and of Peter's nubbly tweed jacket. "Relations?" Her spirits rose a bit. "Relations with presents?"

"No, a solicitor," said Peter gloomily.

Lawrie stopped dead in her tracks, eyes hawk-wild with disaster. "Have they found a long-lost son of Cousin Jon's living in Australia or something?"

"And we'll all have to beg for our bread?" said Peter, plainly not sure whether to console Lawrie or have the fun of teasing her. Lawrie gave him a hard shove in the shoulder.

"_There_ you are," said Ginty, appearing from the kitchen door in a palpable aura of flighty excitement. "Come on."

The solicitor was a youngish beaky-nosed man with a freckled neck. Even Lawrie couldn't really see him as a herald of disaster, Australian or otherwise, and however hard she pretended to try. She slipped into the room, and, being an improvident latecomer, had to make do with the stool with the wobbly leg. Ann half got up to offer her armchair instead, but their mother frowned at her. Ann looked distressed but stayed put.

The solicitor smiled round at them from his position by the library fireplace. "And _all_ these are your children, Mrs Marlow? Good heavens. And... er... which is Ann?"

Ann looked comprehensively shocked to be called on, but she raised her hand as matter-of-factly as if she'd been called upon in a Scripture lesson.

"Well, I have very good news for you, Ann," said the solicitor, beaming in an avuncular way. "After the various bequests to charity and old servants, your godmother's estate has been valued at a little over twenty million, and you are the sole inheritor. Naturally a trust will be set up..."

"Will I be able to give to charity myself?" said Ann. She spoke shyly, but with a confidence that she hadn't had, even just the minute before.

"Well, until you attain your majority, there are certain provisions..." the solicitor began.

Lawrie hugged her knees. Part of her head was busy making up another universe where the solicitor said _which of you is Lawrence_ instead, and she was trying to decide whether the _first_ order of business was to buy an aeroplane or a circus.

The other part of her mind was noting, in a stage-manager-like way, that she bet that from now on everyone would be a lot nicer to her sister Ann.

* * *

A young ensign was waiting at the airlock as the spaceships docked. She made a Service-standard salute.

As the delegation emerged, they noticed several things. Firstly, that the spaceship smelt _cleaner_ than any of the others in the Fleet, and that all the surfaces sparkled. Secondly, that indefinable hum of a happy ship, unmistakeable as a happy beehive.

Thirdly, that their heads-up displays were flickering with useful data; the nearest heads, the safety procedures in case of sudden failure of the artificial gravity, and finally, a message: _welcome to the Imperial Star Service Ship _Guide_, Captain: Ann-4 Marlow_.

"Marlow?" said one of the delegation. "Any relation to _the_ Captain Marlow?"

The ensign gave a sunny, capable little smile. The smile was slightly indulgent, as if she got asked this a lot.

"Ask anyone on the _Guide_, sir," she said proudly, flicking a speck off her already immaculate uniform. "As far as we're concerned, there _is_ only one Captain Marlow."

* * *

The long, low car drew to a halt in the middle of the French road, under the beech trees. There were no shadows in the cold autumn sky. A man in grey uniform stepped out of the car. He was well-muscled and well-fed, which was more than you could say for most of the inhabitants of Creucy-Le-Preux or the surrounding villages.

On the road behind him, the girl on the bicycle caught her breath. Her lungs already burnt inside, from bicycling in the crisp October cold. Her blonde plaits peeked out from under her wool beret and streamed behind her. Reluctantly, she wheeled the bicycle to a halt.

The soldier looked at her as if she and the bicycle were two species of particularly disgusting fungus growing on a tree. He snapped his fingers. She propped the bicycle against a tree-trunk and went over towards the car. Her heart was beating faster than she would have liked. He wouldn't find anything suspicious in that, she told herself. There had already been enough... incidents... with the occupying army to make any woman wary of a car stopped on a road two miles from the nearest farmhouse.

Miles from help. But then, she'd always relied on herself, and on the greatest Help of all.

The soldier turned and opened the passenger door, snapping off a salute. "Heil Hitler!" he said, staring straight into his superior's left ear with an appearance of jackbooted respect.

"Heil Hitler!" said the officer, unfolding himself out of the darkness.

Her throat felt crampy and compacted. She told herself it was just the long ride up the hill, with the cold air scalding her lungs. She knew it wasn't. The officer had a mild, unfractious face. It could have belonged to a country sausage-butcher.

Instead, it belonged to a butcher of a different kind.

"Heil Hitler," he said, looking at her with a merry shrewdness in his small eyes. He was the only one there who could afford to be merry. She and the soldier both had too much most to lose. She, most of all.

She thought of all the lives depending on her. "Heil Hitler," she said, with a light in her blue eyes that anyone who didn't know her would have mistaken for absolute sincerity.

"What are you doing on this road? Do you have a permit?"

She meekly showed her permit. It named her as Anne Martin, aged twenty-two, French citizen and resident of Creucy-Le-Preux. "I'm taking a parcel to my aunt. Some eggs and butter. A present from my mother."

He ran his thick thumb under the line that said _citoyenne_. "A pity, eh? From your looks you could be German."

"My father came from Alsace," she lied.

"A pity he did not stay there, eh? You might be doing your part for the Reich now." He jerked his head to the soldier. The soldier went through her basket methodically, smashing every one of the eggs, even ripping out the checked cotton lining of the basket. There was nothing there. There was nothing _left_, by the time he'd done. The butter didn't go back in the basket, though she didn't see where it went.

"Go on. Visit your aunt. And remember, that only those who work deserve to eat." He shoved the papers back at her and clambered into the car again. The soldier closed the car door and looked at the girl with wolfish eyes.

"You _could_ be a German," he said. It was very nearly an offer.

She made herself return something that was very nearly a smile. "What's your name?"

"Reinhard." He scratched the back of his thick neck. All at once he looked like a man and not a monster. That made it worse, somehow, what she was contemplating. He smiled at her again, almost shyly, and got back behind the wheel.

_We are all God's children_, she thought soberly. _God forgive us both_.

She thought of all the people relying on her. The people who trusted her implicitly. She thought of the information she was carrying, the papers in the unassuming brown packet.

With that brown packet still safely if scratchily tucked into the waistband of her skirt, Ann Marlow of SOE rode on up the hill.

* * *

None of the nurses had much free time around Christmas, but someone had still made time to deck out their cold little sitting-room with bright red and green paper chains, and even to provide a very small sparkly silver tinsel tree to stand on the window-sill. They came in in twos and threes, tired from their long shifts at the hospital, glad of the whistling kettle and the two-bar electric fire.

"Turn the other bar on, Christine, let's live a little."

"We should crash the doctors' lounge, it's all plush carpets and chocolate biscuits in there."

"Not even chocolate biscuits would tempt me. If I ever see one more doctor in my life, it'll be too soon."

Another two presents were stowed under the little tree. The window-sill was almost full.

"Who did you get in the Secret Santa?"

"Can't say! Rules are rules!"

The door opened again. The nurses looked round warily, half-expecting some kind of emergency to drag them to their tired feet; but when they saw who it was, they broke into smiles again. Two of them made room on the sofa nearest the fire, and Christine got up, unobtrusively, to fill the kettle once again.

"No need to ask who did the decorating! Thanks, Ann!"

"Where did you find the tree?"

"Given to her by one of her admirers, I expect."

"You going to marry that old boy in Seymour Ward, Ann? He loves you. Always asks for you to do the blanket baths."

Smiling and shaking her head, Ann sat down and let the cheery talk wash the weariness away, in a place where she was happy and accepted.

* * *

"I still say," said Lawrie, triumphantly rediscovering an old grudge, "that this ought to make me at least a Viscountess."

"Oh, be quiet. Don't you realise you're in Westminster Abbey?" said Karen, who was plainly too snappy with nerves to be sociable. Lawrie supposed that it was something to do with being in charge of the infant Dodds, though actually at this precise moment only Chas was in his stepmother's charge, and apart from growing two inches between the hiring of his suit and the final fitting, his behaviour had been impeccable.

Mrs Marlow adjusted her picture hat. "I wish those cameramen would go away."

"Those are all right, Ma, they're the BBC," said Rowan. "We're done with the paparazzi for the present."

Nicola sat still with her hands folded in her lap. This should have been calming; however, as her eager blue gaze kept darting around from columns to ceiling to reredos as if she were trying to populate the place with the funeral of Nelson (as, indeed, she was), the effect was anything but.

"Will they sing _Zadok the Priest_?" said Ginty, showing off.

"That's _coronations_, my good girl," said Giles in a lordly way. "Give them a little time before she has to go through that."

"Keep the noise down, can't you?" growled Peter.

"No one said you _had_ to go drinking with your future brother-in-law last night," said Giles, sounding more lordly than ever. "Nor did anyone make you try to prove that the Navy can outdrink the Army."

"Did it work?" said Lawrie, interested.

"Do be quiet," said Rowan. "I think that's the Lord Chamberlain."

The buzz of conversation rose; fell again at the sight of several figures slipping quietly in at the front of the church, hands clasped in the backs of their well-starched dress uniforms; and then rose again only to be quashed all at once as the choir burst into song. Lawrie looked round, eyes goggling, but of course it was only the procession for the Archbishop of Canterbury. Ann was still a mile and a half away in a coach like something out of _Cinderella_, waving bravely to the crowds and trying not to give in to a fit of most un-Ann-like nerves.

"Oh, don't look as if she's going to the gallows, Ma," said Rowan, squeezing her mother's hand. "If anyone can charm the tabloids, meet the Prime Minister for tea, _and_ deter the corgis from doing anything untoward to her shoes, it's our own Ann."


End file.
